The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Editing and sharing documents with a group of people can be very difficult. For example, a person in a group may author a document and send the document to group members to review and edit. Each group member may make edits and send an edited version back to the original author to review. Unfortunately, edits from various group members may be difficult and time consuming to merge. Furthermore, some edits for different group member may conflict with each other. For example, one group member may remove part of a sentence, another group member may re-word the sentence, and yet another group member may move the original sentence to another part of the document. The original author may be overwhelmed trying to merge the edits of the various members.
As an alternative, a group member may create an “online” document hosted by a web server. The group member may invite other group members to view and edit the online document. For example, a group member, through a web browser displaying the document, may select a cursor location and a character to insert at the cursor location. In response, the web browser may send the cursor location and the character to a web server hosting the online document. The web server may update the online document stored on the web server and echo the cursor location and character to other web browsers displaying the online document. Each browser that receives the cursor location and character may update the document displayed accordingly
Web servers hosting an online document may require that group members edit the document while online. Otherwise, group members may create conflicting versions of the same online document while editing the document offline.
Viewing online documents can be difficult on different devices. For example, online documents may be page-based. In a page-based document, the content in the document may be rendered as if printed on a standard cut sheet of paper. However, some devices, such as mobile phones, may have small view ports that make viewing a page-based document difficult. Some mobile devices allow users to zoom in and out of a document as needed. But zooming in an out of documents can be a frustrating user experience.